President Uhuru Kenyatta signed Kenya’s first oil export deal worth $12 million on Thursday, officially making the country one of the oil exporters in the continent.

“We are now an oil exporter. Our first deal was concluded this afternoon with 200,000 barrels at a price of $12 million. ”  Kenyatta announced during a Cabinet brief.

“I think we have started the journey and it is up to us to ensure that those resources are put to the best use to make our country both prosperous and to ensure we eliminate poverty,” he added.

President Kenyatta flagged off four trucks with 156 barrels of Crude Oil from Lokichar in Turkana to Mombasa for storage at Kenya Oil Refineries Limited in June last year, but Kenya had to hit a target of 200,000 barrels in order to ship the crude oil.

Early this year London-based Tullow Oil Plc, which discovered oil in Turkana in 2012,  announced plans to invest Sh7 billion in its Kenyan operations as the multinational stepped up preparations for commercial production starting 2022.

The money would be spent in will be spent in developing wells in Turkana County where the multinational discovered an estimated 1.2 billion barrels of oil reserves.

Kenya now joins Uganda as the only two oil-producing nations in East Africa.